The Sphinx Group at Carnegie Mellon University is committed to releasing the long-time, DARPA-funded Sphinx projects widely, in order to stimulate the creation of speech-using tools and applications, and to advance the state of the art both directly in speech recognition, as well as in related areas including dialog systems and speech synthesis.

The CMU Sphinx project released a set of reasonably mature, world-class speech components that provide a basic level of technology to anyone interested in creating speech-using applications without the once-prohibitive initial investment cost in research and development; the same components are open to peer review by all researchers in the field, and are used for linguistic research as well.